How We've Built the Skyhook Brand

We have proudly announced our newest product, Skyhook Context, a platform that combines Skyhook’s rich location data with a layer of context to allow our customers to deliver personalized, relevant content and dynamic experiences to mobile users. Along with the rollout of our new product, we have also launched a new website to help better highlight each of our new product offerings.

Here we discuss our new website with our Creative Director, Boris Savic, who has been instrumental in designing some of the creative concepts for the new vision of Skyhook since his joining the company last year.

1) What was your approach and vision when you redesigned the website?

For any company, website is the most obvious extension of it’s brand. Working on it is an opportunity to take a step back and look at ourselves honestly. Questions like, who are we? Who do we want to be? What do we look like from the outside in? Nothing forces you to confront these truths about your brand like having to write copy or design visuals for a website. It’s an exhilarating and gut wrenching experience. At the end of the day, the end result feels like we’ve been honest to ourselves, like this is really who Skyhook is.

2) What new features or Skyhook capabilities were you looking to highlight with this new website?

Skyhook Context! Actionable context is a promise that has been made in the industry in the past and it hasn’t been delivered successfully until now. The challenge has been to come up with a story that does justice to the technical chops of Context. Do it in a way that people can connect with, react to and truly understand the possibilities in terms of what it can do for their own brand.

3) What were your greatest challenges?

As visual and UX designers, we have a specific skill set in terms of producing polished, “designed” deliverables. But a process like this is a collaboration first and foremost. We have some very smart people here who know our products, our audience, and they have strong opinions about what Skyhook should be. My job is to take the essence of that and put it into design vernacular that will be an accurate expression of those ideas. We never lost sight of that, and between Idea Paint, paper prototyping and lots of revisions, we believe we managed to pull it off. It wasn’t easy, but the result, and having arrived at it this way, is incredibly satisfying.

4) What do you consider to be your greatest success with this website? Any graphics or designs that you are particularly proud of?

Not the design as much as the team. I got to to work with some very talented folks on this project, and we’ve pushed each other from day one to make this a better, smarter experience. Along the way we’ve unearthed some interactions and principles that I think will become a cornerstone of how users interact with our products in terms of UI and general “delight the user” moments. The next steps is cataloging those, making them a conscious part of our brand, and weaving them into the product experience.

5) What’s coming next?

We think of this website as a living breathing thing. Not an end-point, but a beginning of a better, more dynamic dialog with our users. So in a way the true test of how well we’ve done will come from those conversations and I’m really looking forward to that part. So keep the feedback coming!